The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.

Perhaps that is what it means to be a father - to teach your child to live without you.

...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it-just to name it-must have been like trying to catch something invisible.

All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough.